A pleasant day, and the packing is getting on nicely. No parking permit, however. I tried the telephone number you sent, Shandy – comment, Tuesday. It got me through to a bemused young librarian BUT he knew the number I needed to phone. So thank you, and bless you, for that.

The real number, after an unnecessary amount of if-you-want-this-press-that (unnecessary, because no one except Shandy knows the number to ring in the first place) produced an intelligent human being who briskly looked up my car, using the number on the license plate, and said that the permit has been sent and if it doesn’t arrive tomorrow we can go get a temporary one.

Archie came to lunch, and was instructed in cat care. We hatched a plan wherein he will get a driving license and, assuming I am still alive, we will fly to Detroit and view that ruined city, including the places where I used to live: 2211 Virginia Park, 18214 and 17586 Parkside. It might be almost as interesting as Pompeii. We forgot that he was supposed to be there to help me with putting out the recycling. It’s a fortnightly job, and I think this time we can leave it.

The weather is still preposterously good, and the forecast is that it will continue. There was news last night that the heat – my dears, it’s over 80 – has caused problems on the railway. Something else to worry about. When I was first here, in the summer of 1953, the temperature was over 80 for a few days and England was prostrate.

As for knitting, the new grey yarn is here from Jamieson & Smith, and of course I realised when I met Maureen in Kathy’s Knits yesterday that I could have bought it there, for half the price. She sells exclusively British yarns, and has a good range from J&S. I went on with Archie’s socks. I’ve knit the heel flap and turned the heel and picked up the gusset stitches for the first one.

In the days when my husband and I went to London three or four times a year, I knit lots of socks. This time, for an alarming moment, I wondered if I had forgotten how to turn a heel. But no, I can still do it.

The new VK – the lace issue – arrived today, at first tossed aside in despair because the parking permit wasn’t included, but later thumbed through with some pleasure. There are some seriously good things in there. Had I but world enough and time…

And there’s a good article by Meg about designing shawls – except that it takes me back, yet again, to that troubling, anti-feminist, paragraph in the Knitter’s Almanac, about the pi-shawl. I understand that the radius of a circle is directly and constantly related to the circumference via Pythagoras’ theorem. I still don’t see why Elizabeth’s theorem is therefore right, although I am sure it is. (EZ: starting from the centre, cast on 9,; knit a round of YO, K1; 3 rounds plain; another increase round, 6 rounds plain. Each increase round doubles the number of stitches; then you knit twice as many rounds as before, before the next increase round.) (I’d understand if I were a man, according to EZ.)

I won’t post again until somewhere around the 11^th  or 12^th of July, home from the Hebrides.